I’m dictating this as I drive in my car, on my way to buy supper that I have to cook at 7:03 PM.

I stayed in bed too long after my afternoon nap between 4:15 and 6 o’clock, because frankly lying in bed under heavy warm covers, reading through Twitter, finding what’s there, discovering which voices are saying what about their lives, is about the most pleasurable thing in my life, these days.

Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty – and I say plenty – of enjoyable experiences in my day. My life is never without them. But lying in bed, idling away, my mind afire with ideas from people who think on purpose, in a warm, weighted space is about the closest thing to bliss I can imagine, these days.

And reading the words of others, I think about my own voice. I think about my people. I think about all the Autistics I know and have known, and I think about what we bring to the world. Everybody knows what we bring, but very few people know that we’re the ones who bring it. And they certainly don’t know how we do it or why we do it. There’s no point in trying to explain. They think they have this Autism business all figured out. Some assholes with influence and power have decided it for society at large, and who are any of us to question that?

And I think about this writing. “Blogging” they call it. Makes it sound so simple. Makes it sounds so trite. An exercising in ego. Just a few words barfed out on the screen, in the hope that anybody’s listening… regardless of whether anybody cares. Ego-casting. Vanity. That’s how it’s often been seen, and sometimes we earn that reputation.

But still… it seems unfair.

The blogging medium has been mine for almost as long as it’s existed. I knew, right away, how powerful it could be. I’ve turned friends on to the practice, and some of them have become extremely successful at it, gaining followers and fans, professional connections and book contracts and staff positions as writers with publishers like Conde Nast. Pretty sweet. It’s way more than I’ve ever been able to accomplish, but I like to think my input made a difference.

Most of the time, that’s about the best I can ask for, anyway.

As for me, I just don’t have the energy to do much more than I already do. I don’t have a working partner to support me as I pursue my dreams. I don’t have a life that lets me spend hours and hours on refining my craft. And I certainly don’t have hours and hours to spend reading the words of others, as much as I’d like to. People put down the short-form reading and writing that abounds these days, but it seems to me that some of us can’t afford anything other than short-form.

We don’t have the time, we don’t have the money that makes that sort of leisure possible. You know — the stuff the people used to just take for granted – cozying up with a long book on grey, rainy day, sinking into it for hours at a time, becoming one with the material, being one with the story, feeling as though the author has crept into your cells and reconfigured them from the inside out. Who has the luxury of that, these days?

If you’re not chronically ill and trying to hold down a full-time job while you support your disabled, dependent spouse and keep your house in order, yeah, I suppose you would. If you don’t end up exhausting yourself jumping the horns of the 9-to-5 bulls in the Minoan circus ring of modern day society, yeah I suppose you might. If you don’t completely destroy any semblance of functionality in the course of just getting by on neurotypical terms, day in and day out, yeah I can see how that would be possible.

But me? Nope. That’s not the world I live in. And that’s not what’s possible.

So, I blog. I read blogs. I follow links on Twitter and I see what’s there, preferably something that’s a little bit longer than a 20 minute read, but not too much longer, because I have stuff to do. And I have to get it done, because nobody else is going to do it for me. I really don’t feel like dying.

It’s really easy to die when you’re Autistic. It’s really easy to just lose it. I lose it regularly. I usually can get it back, but it comes at a cost. It takes hours, days, weeks, sometimes months to get it back. Yeah, I can totally right myself again. But not like other people think I can. And that like I wish I could.

It’s taken me, what — 35 years? — to figure it out. I’ll say 35 because it sounds nice and it digits out to eight, which is the signifier of eternity for me, which is what pretty much everything feels like to be, half the time. Eternity. Infinity. Endless possibilities, with no end in sight… fortunately… unfortunately.

And as I pull into the supermarket parking lot, I’m happy. Because it only took me 13 minutes to get here, there was no traffic, the light rain is keeping people off the roads but not making my life that much more difficult to navigate, and I know exactly when I’m getting when I walk in the grocery store. I wish to God I had the time and the energy to write more.